Help! Slackware has lost my SUSE partition!

I run a dual boot machine running Win XP home and SUSE Linux.
I recently decided to try out Slackware 10.1, and managed to get it to install into some unformatted space on my hard drive. I have LILO installled to a boot disk, and can use it to access Slackware or Windows XP.
However, when I remove the disk and boot, the word "GRUB" appears and then the system hangs, so I am effectively "locked out" of my SUSE installation

I would like to either repair GRUB to gain access to my SUSE installation, or add the ability to boot to SUSE into my LILO boot disk

If it's possible, i'd like to wind up with a bootloader installed to my harddrive with the ability to boot to either WinXP, SUSE or Slack

WinXP is /dev/hda1
Slack is /dev/hda6

I believe SUSE is somewhere between those, but I am, not sure

Thanks,

Zach

SuSE has good rescue tools and you can re-install grub to the mbr so you can boot between it and Windows. Then it's just a matter of editing your SuSE /boot/grub/menu.lst to tell it where Slack is. Did you make a Slack boot floppy? Re-install grub to the mbr with SuSE, make sure it lets you boot between SuSE and Windows flawlessly first. Then you can edit your SuSE /boot/grub/menu.lst to be able to boot into Slack.

OK, this is good news, I'll have to wait till tommorrow to try this (I don't have my Suse disks on me at the moment) and I'll get back to you on whether I was able to rescue it

Here's how to get lilo installed and booting all your partitions (you should be on slackware). First off, you need to be sure of which partition suse is on. You can check this by giving fdisk the -l option like this 'fdisk -l /dev/hda' and it will list all your partitions. Pick whichever one is your suse partition, then mount it 'mount /dev/hda3 /mnt' (replace /dev/hda3 with suse partition). Then cd to /mnt/boot and do an ls to see what the kernel is, it will probably be called vmlinuz or something similar. That name is what you need to remember. Then, edit /etc/lilo.conf and add a section for suse, like this:

image = /boot/vmlinuz
label = suse
root = /dev/hda3

(replace vmlinuz with the proper kernel name and /dev/hda3 with the proper partition)
Save it, then run lilo, and reboot to see if it worked.

Heh, 2 posts in the time it took me to write this. Hopefully you'll get either grub or lilo working.

I dont seem to have an fdisk command , i typed "fdisk -l /dev/hda" at the command line, and it returned:
-sh: fdisk: command not found

Did you do it as root? That would cause a return of "command not found" if you weren't. Also, (just checking), you didn't use the quotation did you? If so, don't use them. If by chance fdisk isn't installed, you need to install util-linux.

Oops..

I ran it as root and got the following output:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 6374 51199123+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 8758 9729 7807590 77 Unknown
/dev/hda3 6375 8756 19133415 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 6375 6505 1052226 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda6 6506 8756 18081126 83 Linux

What type of file system did you format your SuSE with? Are you going with grub or lilo? I can help with grub but know next to nothing about lilo. If you're going with lilo, valan can show you how to do it. :)

I'd prefer to use GRUB, and SUSE is in a FAT32 partition

Strange that fdisk lables it as an unknown file system. I've never worked with a Linux distro on a fat32 file system so I hope everything is the same.

The first thing to do is to reinstate your SuSE grub boot loader. There may be any number of ways to do this, but here's how I'd approach it: Put in the first SuSE cd, boot and choose "Installation," then "Repair installed System." Then choose "Customized Repair" and run. If it ask if you want to repair your file system at hda6, answer no. Go through the process and at the end, it will ask about repairing the boot loader. Answer yes, and keep your old configuration. If it isn't chosen, only change the part about installing grub to the MBR, and have it installed there.

After this "Repair" you should have a new /boot/grub/menu.lst that boots to SuSE and Windows. Post back when done and we'll move to the easy part: editing your menu.lst to include Slackware as a boot choice. Good Luck! :)